I agree. Although Cruz was talking about budget negotiations, to me it applies to the issue of immigration more than any other issue. That’s because so many Republicans are not only prepared to vote for amnesty, they are actively campaigning for it, even though it is not only damaging public policy, but damaging to those same Republican’s political futures.

At least with the Democrats, I perfectly understand their motivations for wanting amnesty, and frankly, from their perspective they seem totally logical to me. It’s bad public policy for the nation, but its great political policy. For the Democrats, out of a possible 11 million new voters 10 to 15 years from now, 9 million will vote for Democrats. That’s enough to turn the rest of the Southwest, including Texas, deep blue. Without Texas, the Republicans are no longer viable as a national party.

And from a policy perspective, that adds 11 million more citizens in which ¾ of them don’t even have a high school diploma and virtually none of them have the high tech skills required for the 21st century workplace. That means most of them will live and die below the mean income level, and will be major consumers of social programs. That’s voting gold for the Democrats. The Democratic Party was never stronger as when FDR saw “one third of a nation, ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished.” Importing millions to fill that gap helps create the very conditions of income inequality and widespread poverty that is the fertile ground for Democratic power.

But what do the Republicans get out of it?

That is the real head scratcher. Of course there are some aspects of big business that do use unskilled and semi skilled labor that really like the downward push on working class wage rates that increased numbers of unskilled workers provide. Certainly the Wall Street Journal Opinionpage is filled with pro illegal immigration editorials. But for most businesses interested in immigration, the demand isn’t for millions of unskilled workers but for hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, which current immigration law limits to a mere trickle.

Politically, it seems to make even less sense. There isn’t any evidence that pro illegal immigration positions help Republican candidates. A recent CIS study showed that Latinos in pro-immigration Republican Districts were no more likely to vote for Republicans than Latinos living in anti-illegal immigration Republican Districts. Certainly it didn’t help Senator John McCain in his 2008 Presidential bid. And of course, what is the political advantage of ensuring that your political party remains a minority party for the foreseeable future?

And yet… Republicans, including conservatives, are falling all over each other to support the Gang of 8 bill. Fox talker Sean Hannity even hosted a one hour special for Marco Rubio last Friday that did little more than pimp the bill with friendly “questions” and a generally pro bill agenda. Hard as I try, I can’t see a rational reason to support this. Bad public policy, bad political strategy… what am I missing?

My suspicion is that I’m not missing much, and that the real problem with Republicans is that they think they can buy Latino votes with the bribery that has proven so successful for the Democratic Party for decades. But the Democrats can’t be outbid. There is no line that Republicans can draw that Democrats won’t cross to buy more votes. Republicans were just as delusional in 1986 when they accepted a “one time’ amnesty with the promise that this would be the last one and that Latinos would now love Republicans.

Instead we lost California permanently. Well, if Republicans regard Texas as an embarrassment they can’t wait to be rid of, they are well on their way. The Democrats won’t be embarrassed by Texas at all once they own it.

When I reviewed BBC’s Sherlock last year, I noted that CBS was planning its own rip-off version of the Sherlock Holmes character, seemingly to ride on the success of the BBC version. After watching the first season of Elementary, which concluded with a two hour season finale last week, I’m glad I waited to do a review of the show, since my conclusions now are vastly different from the ones that I would have drawn when the show was just a few episodes into its freshman season.

The set up of the show is that Sherlock Holmes lives in New York City (yes he’s still British), while recovering from a stint in rehab after crashing from a serious heroin addiction problem. Dr Joan Watson is hired by Holmes’s off screen aloof and distant father to be his sober companion, to assist in Holmes’s recovery. As part of her job she moves in with Holmes and follows him around to make sure he doesn’t relapse. From that starting point, Holmes resumes his relationship with the NYPD as “consulting detective;” similar to the position he held in London with Scotland Yard.

After watching the first couple of episodes, my feelings toward the show was that it was a well crafted TV show, well done in the sense that CBS has long experience with putting together solid television programming, with solid leads in the roles, but that it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. Although the Holmes stories are the template of the eccentric detective and side kick, which have proliferated on television since the beginning of the TV era, those shows were not Sherlock Holmes stories. Psych is a good solid show with witty wordplay and a humorous bent about an eccentric genius detective and his down to earth side kick that helps keep him grounded. Monk was a good solid show with light fun stories about an eccentric detective and a down to earth side kick… well, you get the idea. It’s a common TV template that’s been replicated over and over for years; with various degrees of success.

That was my initial conclusion. Elementary was a good solid show, but there was no need for the characters to be named Holmes and Watson. They could have any names and it wouldn’t have mattered to the show.

Until it mattered.

The last half of the season very slowly began to explore the reasons for Holmes’s spiraling drug abuse, the murder of his one true love, Irene Adler, and Holmes inability to solve her murder. In the episode, “M” Holmes confronts murders done in almost identical matter to the one that killed Irene Adler and revealing whom may be ultimately responsible, Moriarty. From this point, the shows seem a bit less stand alone adventures and more interlinked stories that eventually form a story arc leading to a fantastic and fulfilling season finale. All of the pieces finally fit.

So that’s why I’m glad I waited to review the show. It turned out to be much more than I initially thought, and even if CBS is trying to ride the coattails of Sherlock, since it leads to a quality show that deserves to be Holmes in its own right, who cares?

Contrary to popular opinion, both in the national press and in the Republican Party, the conservative movement is split on the amnesty issue. Just cast your mind all the way back to…last year. During the Republican Primary battles, all of the conservative candidates were in favor of some version of amnesty. The single hold out? Mitt Romney, the “moderate.”

English: Former Speaker of the Florida House at CPAC in . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So it’s a confusing battle space that has anti tax activist Grover Norquist on the same side as liberal Senator Chuck Schumer, and moderate, establishment Republican columnist David Frum on the anti amnesty side while traditional conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is pro amnesty. On the talk radio side the views are more what you would expect, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin are reliably anti-amnesty, however Sean Hannity switched sides after the election and now supports amnesty (although he is still cagey about it). Otherwise, things are more what you would expect from a conservative split on immigration. The neo-cons are pro amnesty (think William Kristol) and the paleo-cons are anti (think Pat Buchanan).

So where does that leave Tea Party darling Marco Rubio? Square in the middle.

Rubio is a real conservative. I’ve listened to enough politicians talk to know when they are the real deal and when they are just using the conservative movement to advance their own careers *cough* Newt Gingrich* cough.

Rubio has long been a supporter of some variation of the Dream Act, which are a series of proposals to legalize illegal aliens brought over as children. Given that as children they didn’t really have a choice about crossing the border illegally; it’s fairly easy to make the moral case to anti-amnesty conservatives for creating some mechanism for them to stay, after border security. But it was a shock when he joined in with a group of liberal Senators and pro-amnesty Republicans, the Gang of 8, to craft a comprehensive immigration bill.

First, it was a shock that after the disaster of Obamacare, any Republican Senator would try to make common cause on a bill that intends to be “comprehensive.” For conservatives, comprehensive is code word for cramming as much crap as possible into a massive bill and hope no one notices what’s in it. The purpose of comprehensive bills is to slide revolting items through the process that would never pass on their own. Of course, in the case of the immigration bill, the sole purpose is to get amnesty through. Everything else in the bill is a sweetener to buy votes for amnesty, even though there are plenty of real, needed issues that need to be worked on. Instead, nothing is more important than amnesty. Steve Jobs found this out while trying to convince President Obama to loosen up on the H1-B Visa program. From the Wall Street Journal:

According to Mr. Isaacson, Jobs “stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the U.S. should be given a visa to stay in the country.” The president reportedly replied that this would have to await broader immigration reform, which he said he was unable to accomplish.

“Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis,” Mr. Isaacson writes. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” Jobs said. “It infuriates me.”

A simple bill to allow graduates of US schools to get a Visa would enjoy large bipartisan support and would pass easily. So therefore we can’t allow it until we make sure we drag 11 million other people along with them!

So now Rubio is stuck riding this tiger all the way to completion. Meanwhile, his reputation will be marred by every little crazy line item that is stuck in the bill, such as the one creating a biometric data base of all US adults. So why would he join in with the Gang of 8? How could this benefit him?

Just a couple of ideas and I don’t know if any of them are close to the mark:

+ He knows it won’t pass and just wants to build up some “moderate cred” for 2016.

+ He’s inexperienced and doesn’t realize that Schumer and his gang are taking him for a ride.

+ He’s extremely experienced (a former Speaker of the House in the Florida legislature) and he’s playing the Gang of 8 by trying to “cooperate” up to the point that he can exploit the weaknesses of the bill and then blame the Senate Democrats and the Obama administration for sabotaging the bill with poison pills to keep the bill from passing and keep it as a political issue.

I’m sure there are probably many more possible reasons, but I don’t see any way for this to end well for Rubio’s political future other than at some point he disowns the bill. If he doesn’t and ends up voting for whatever monstrosity slithers out of the Senate, than Rubio’s reputation will be damaged. To conservatives, he will be a traitor, and to liberals he’ll be a gullible fool.

Since immigration has once again reared its ugly head as an imminent issue, complete with a “comprehensive” bill designed to keep the pesky details hidden from the great unwashed, I’ve been discussing it online in political web forums. It’s an interesting issue since its almost invisible until some legislation brings it from the back to front burner, and I have to wonder how an issue that causes such explosive passion and interest can then shut itself off and go dark until… well until the next time. I’m guilty of it myself. Unless there is some legislation, like the current bill, the Arizona legislation, or the 2007 immigration reform attempt, I don’t think about it much either.

But back to the online political forums. One thing I’ve noticed that’s different now from previous occasions when immigration has been a hot issue is that the proponents are now so cagey about their amnesty support. They’re not demure about supporting amnesty, but they have become much shyer about the why.

Now of course partisan Democrats want the new voters and new customers for social services and some Republicans want a steady flow of cheap labor, but the philosophical underpinnings seem to be a bit hazier. Generally I’ve discovered on forums, at the least from the left, is that when you chase them down, eventually you find out that many believe that immigration to the United States is a civil right.

That’s an idea that’s even crazier than it sounds once you break down what that actually means. Does anyone in the world have a right to come to the US to live and work? Yes. Even if 2 or 3 billion people want to come here? Yes.

That’s a political position which seems insane, but our Attorney General, Eric Holder, just subscribed to that very position. Last week, during a speech to the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, he gave a speech, in which he made that very point, stating, that he believed a path to citizenship was a matter of civil and human rights. Since that is such an off the wall position for the Attorney General to have, since it has no basis in US law, you would think that would have been a well reported on speech, consuming newspaper headlines and hours of cable news gabbing.

You would be wrong.

Oh it’s been well covered in the conservative blogosphere. I’ve seen articles in the National ReviewOnline and the Powerline blog, as well as many others, but as far as news goes, I’ve searched and I’ve not seen the speech reported in an actual news site except as an opinion piece. So if you’re the average person who only catches the news from a network news show or the occasional newspaper headline, you’ll never know that the chief law enforcement officer in the United States thinks that a brand new, just made up civil right, is the reward for breaking actual US law. The left really seems to believe this. I recall reading decades ago an article in a leftist magazine that recommended a wet foot-dry foot immigration policy. Actually we’ve more or less had that for decades. But I doubt that’s what the American people would want, nor would they agree with Holder if they knew his immigration views.

But they’re not going to know. It won’t be reported, and reporters are not going to question Holder on it.